Impressions from the Pre-Launch Community Zurich

Before we start for real, it is worth getting real user feedback on the overall user experience of Encointer. This post will summarize our field test experiences so far.

We chose Supercomputing Systems offices as a testing ground with over 100 potential testers and two well-frequented kitchens with consumables. So we created the EdisonPaula community with the ⵐEDI currency. The EDI can currently be used to pay for coffee and beer. Income issuance ceremonies take place every Tuesday at lunchtime.

The 3rd ceremony with 21 participants, before splitting into 3 concurrent meetups at different locations

An Encointer community needs ~10 bootstrappers and a few meetup locations. We chose 10 people who are motivated to attend ceremonies regularly and help educating others about Encointer. 3 meetup locations were defined within the office area of SCS

the encointer app serves as a wallet as well as to prove your personhood and getting your income at ceremonies

We chose to set the income to 22ⵐ EDI per week with a demurrage halving time of one week. This certainly is extreme demurrage that will burn half of your 22ⵐ during one week if you don’t spend it. The real communities may want to choose a less extreme demurrage, but it is worth getting feedback on the experience of seeing your balance decline constantly.

3 meetup locations and money supply after 3 ceremonies
the app tells all participants at what time they need to be where to attend their ceremony meetup to prove their personhood

scanning each others’ keys during proof-of-personhood ceremony meetup

finally, spending ⵐEDI for a coffee

or an after-work beer

Experiences and Learnings

Unsurprisingly, mobile app UX is essential. All steps must be very easy, intuitive and well-explained. Performance of the app seems ok for our users, also the payment process didn’t cause any questions with our testnet blocktime of 6s.

Ceremony meetups were successful and mostly painless. All meetups were able to be concluded in less than 10 minutes for a max. of 10 participants. We realized that QR code scanner speed and robustness is currently the bottleneck and 3 out of 21 participants were deprived of their income because either they could not scan someone or were not scanned by someone because of shattered screens or bad cameras. We will improve the scanner and relax the protocol rules slightly to be more tolerant of real-world effects.

Next Steps

Before we start our very first real community leu.zuerich, we’ll have to upgrade our Kusama parachain to full functionality towards end of March. We already have identified the first few businesses who will accept ⵐLEU as payment 1:1 to the national currency CHF for their products or services. Moreover, we have started talks with potential bootstrappers who build the trusted setup of the LEU community. They should be the first ambassadors of the ⵐLEU community currency.